As of this post, there are 15 different types of Facebook ads and over 1,000 ways to target those ads. The type of Facebook ad you select should vary depending upon your objectives. Facebook offers some of the greatest ad values available right now, and the largest active audience on the planet. Take a tour through our top five picks to learn more about how you can leverage the globe’s most successful social media site.

1. Facebook Dynamic Product Ads

We put this one first because it helps you solve your biggest problem: abandoned shopping carts. Most reliable metrics show that roughly 70 percent of customers walk away from their carts without sealing the deal. Insert the Facebook pixel into your website code, and it will track how your shoppers browse and the items they dropped in their carts. It then kindly reminds them of those products dynamically when they’re scrolling through their newsfeed. It will take some developer resources to set this up correctly, but it’s well worth it. Returning business is easier to convert than new business, and customers appreciate ads that are more personalized.

2. Facebook Multi-Product or Carousel Ads

Our second favorite type of Facebook ad is also one of the most popular. A carousel ad allows sellers to showcase up to 10 images of popular products in a single ad which a customer can scroll through. They are especially popular with lifestyle, fashion, and home goods sites, although they can work with almost any physical product. This becomes a virtual browsing app for you, exposing potential customers to a range of what you offer. Use the call to action feature so people getting familiar with your brand have an opportunity to respond to something they like. Experiment with the dynamic optimization feature which reorders images based on the best-performing images and links for each individual who engages with your ad.

3. Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook’s lead ad design technology enables customers to send you their information without leaving the confines of Facebook. Users are more likely to submit their details to claim a coupon or get a discount code if they’re never asked to click away from the app. Make sure to include a call to action, and test different actions to make sure that customers know where and what to click.

4. Facebook Video

Users love videos, especially colorful videos that are easy-to-follow DIY how-tos, such as recipes, crafts, gardening, and home improvement. You have up to 4GB to play with, which gives you plenty of leeway for graphics, length, music, and narration. Subtitles are recommended since the audio is typically muted. You can find all the specs for video ads here.

5. Promoting Facebook Page Likes

Page likes were the first type of Facebook ad most users became familiar with. It’s pretty simple: promote your brand or page and let users become a follower by clicking “like” right in the ad without having to visit your page. For consumer-facing brands with a big online presence, increasing page likes with your targeted audience is important, especially if you want to involve them in future promotions, content campaigns, and other offers. Get more direction from the source on this page.

If you’re still new to advertising on Facebook and need more advice as to what type of content to promote, that’s what we’re here for. Let us know how we can help, and schedule an informal chat with us today.

Customer and brand loyalty is basically dead. Because of the staggering amount of product choices available on the internet, people don’t shop brands, they shop deals. There are still, however, many brands that have such a distinct story that customers are drawn to them. How well you pull customers to your brand depends almost entirely on branding your business. Marketing is all about communicating a clear narrative.

How you differentiate your brand matters to customers. These creative e-commerce branding tactics will eventually help your brand stand out from the pack. If you want to be memorable, you have to do things that customers will remember. We’ve laid out a structure below that we hope will inspire you to explore your branding strategy in new, exciting ways.

Brand Loyalty is Still Happening

The hipster clothing line Madewell has seen consistent increases in their sales year after year. This isn’t just because of their quality. Their online story is succinct and consistent. If you take a cursory look at the site, it’s clear that they know their customer. Frequent shoppers of the brand will tell you that the homepage is dynamic. The company gives its customers a reason to check in frequently to see what’s new.

Another classic example of brand loyalty is, of course, Apple. People love their iPhones and MacBooks. The company has been so successful with its brand story over the years, they’ve done little to change it. The site is still designed as a destination, with flagship stores complementing the company’s online presence. All of their messaging ties back to the single concept of quality and style above all else. Replicating Apple’s success is almost impossible, but there are some great takeaways that still work today.

Your Five Branding Tips

1. Tell Your Story

Branding your business likely starts with you. Your story is something that your competition can’t own. It’s also something that no one can take away from you. Your story is personal and unique. Try this exercise: spend 10 or 15 minutes writing down what inspired you to start your company. If you’re not a writer, tell the story to a colleague, record it, and write it down later. For example, Steve Jobs became as iconic as his computers, so much so that mentioning his name in a piece about marketing borders on cliche.

You don’t have to be as famous as Steve Jobs to tell a compelling personal story. Blake Mycoskie probably didn’t think he’d ever be a household name. He had a simple idea after traveling through Argentina in 2006: he wanted to find a way to give needy children the world over a pair of shoes. It’s why, as the founder of TOMS, he continues to use “Chief Shoe Giver” as his corporate title. When he founded his shoe company, he continually tied everything back to his core principle of giving. Today he runs a global brand whose humble origins started with his inspirations.

2. Define Your USPs

Your unique selling points are the core of your brand story. Everyone in the company, whether that means two or two thousand employees, needs to know them intimately. Keep the list down to no more than 10 items. They should be as specific as possible. Your USPs aren’t aspirational: they are your company’s essence. Even if your product isn’t unique, your company is.

The cloud project management software company, Basecamp, uses its USPs brilliantly. Basecamp’s e-commerce branding features language that appeals almost exclusively to small businesses. As a company, they are signaling to a potential client that they are the go-to for entrepreneurs and startups, which helps them target everything from social media marketing to online ad targeting.

3. Think Unconventionally

About 10 years ago in Los Angeles, a young chef needed a way to promote his new catering food truck that would create buzz without a big budget. He’d invented a new sort of street food (a taco filled with perfectly grilled Korean barbecue) and needed a creative way to promote it. He used a then fairly new communication platform called Twitter to tell his burgeoning foodie fans where he was parked every night throughout Los Angeles. His daily tweets were both practical (telling everyone how to find them) and exciting (his early inventory sold out quickly, creating a sense of urgency for his early customers).

That chef was Roy Choi and his Kogi trucks kick-started the food truck revolution, all because he figured out a creative way to turn eating street food into an event. How can you use event marketing for your business? How do your products connect to your customers in real-time and how can you exploit that in fun, unusual and original ways? Remember, Choi wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He was just trying to sell tacos.

4. Show your Gratitude

Every time you ship an order, do one thoughtful thing for your customer. Use creative, inspirational packaging. If you have an environmental message, for example, highlight that your boxes are made from recycled content, or show how your protective materials can be reused. Send handwritten notes when you can; you can do this more than you realize when your volume is still low.

Go beyond discounts. All customers expect a 20% discount code and an expiration date along with it. What can you easily give away to every customer on his or her birthday? What can you do for the first 500 people who follow you on social media platforms on their social media anniversary (the day they started following you)? Give away things that are useful and special and that relate back to your brand story and your USPs. Have fun with it and your customers will have fun with you.

5. Be Consistent

The average page visit lasts under a minute. You don’t have long to grab and hold people’s attention. Every single element of your site needs to be as professional as possible. Use pros to take photos, and use a skilled, experienced designer to create your graphics. Consult user experience experts to advise you on your site layout and navigation. Your brand is an ecosystem of message and quality. If a new customer seeks you out, make sure that what they see on the site and the overall experience is as good as the message that brought them there.

Branding your business isn’t as simple as throwing up a tagline and making a few ad buys a month. It’s a holistic process that requires passion, sincerity and vision. The quality of all of your content plays into this as much as your logo and your product research.

Please contact CrewMachine today and find out more about how our experienced product team and extensive team of writers and editors can help you create the content that helps you tell your brand story.

Brick and mortar storefronts lure customers inside with creative visual merchandising. Whether it’s on main street or the internet, the retail space is highly competitive and you have a matter of seconds to grab a buyer’s attention with your virtual storefront.

Visitors make purchasing decisions based on three key components: attraction, engagement and motivation. Your branded environment compels customers to return, engage and buy based on how well you present your inventory in mobile and desktop formats.

In Brief: What E-commerce Visual Merchandising Should Accomplish

Think of your homepage as where you begin your conversation with your customer. Telling your brand story includes many consistent elements:

Compelling and vivid images of your products, including a hero image wherever possible

The more successfully you deploy creative online visual marketing, the more your homepage:

Engages visitors instantly

Increases overall individual sessions

Increases average order value (AOV)

Examples of Excellence in Online Visual Merchandising

We culled the web for examples of fantastic visual merchandising in online retail. These brands may not be household names, but they are brilliant standard-bearers for how e-tailers, both large and small, should grab their customers as soon as those buyers walk in the virtual door.

Social proof features: while not all brands can make hashtags work on the homepage, Rad Soap Company entices the buyer to go to the company’s Instagram page.

Need some help diagnosing your homepage? We can do that. In fact, we’d love to give you a content health report for free. Email us or call us at 888.870.8744 to learn more about how CrewMachine can help you develop road-tested marketing strategies to increase sales.

AI has been impacting the online experience since the advent of search way back in 1996 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google. Smart engines already supply customer recommendations in online shopping (Amazon) and viewing recommendations (YouTube, Netflix). As machine learning evolves, there are countless other ways that applications of artificial intelligence in e-commerce will improve more than just the online shopping experience.

See it, Search, Buy It

Imagine going to a wedding or a special event and falling in love with a friend’s pair of shoes. Visual search helps you find exactly what you want based on something you saw. Take a picture of those shoes, and an AI engine could find multiple samples of something similar. This saves time on the consumer side and increases discoverability for retailers.

Virtual Personal Shoppers

Not everyone loves to spend hours searching for a new jacket online. That’s why companies like, North Face, are introducing artificial intelligence applications that shop for you. Software is faster than humans and may be better at finding specific items based on simple logic rather than emotion. Think about how Waze helps you find the right route based on traffic patterns. It’s using real data to get you there faster, although that route may differ from your habits or assumptions. A virtual shopper could lead buyers to online e-tailers and products they may not have otherwise sought out.

Improved Personalization

There are many ways to gather information about both what you’re shopping for and how you shop. Currently, ad re-targeting reminds users about items that were abandoned in their carts. Eventually, AI could gather even more information about how specific, individual shoppers search for goods, research, and curate information before making a buy. This information, in turn, may lead to smarter and more customized ad platforms and recommendation engines that improve the personal shopping experience.

Integration of AI and CRM

Machines are better equipped to analyze large blocks of data more quickly than humans. All products and brands have to compete on customer service, and AI could help scale customer service more effectively. Imagine that an upset customer is more accurately routed to the right team based on more smarter voice-responsive software. Software could do a better job of helping customers find products and direct them to the right answer to their query or concern.

Using Natural Language Processing for Search

Sometimes, when putting search terms into an engine, it take a few tries before you get the results you want. NLP, or natural language processing, is one of the fastest-growing forms of artificial intelligence in e-commerce because it will help customers get from point A (searching) to point B (conversion) more quickly and with less frustration. NLP enables machines to learn how humans speak and can translate that speech into all types of behavior. Because this is such a wide-ranging field, the applications for this technology will impact everything from shopping to medicine.

CrewMachine is using AI to drive how e-commerce brands create and manage online content and fix problems too great for human teams to solve alone. We’d love to talk more about it, so contact us to set up a demo today.

This year, the eZdia team is hosting a little group to go see the defending 2017 World Series Champions, Chicago Cubs. There are a few themes that lead us to this.

First: we are huge baseball fans and jumped at the opportunity to go to one of the storied parks in the league especially since the Cubs broke the Billy Goat Curse.

Second: we admire Theo Epstein and his application of machine learning and analytics to winning baseball championships for not only the Cubs, but the Red Sox, too. (For more info: check out both the film and book versions of his story, “Moneyball.”) Winning is never a fluke. Data and analytics is transforming sports and other industries, turning all kinds of consumers into data nerds.

The eZdia team created CrewMachine with some of the same principles that Theo Epstein uses. We deploy analytics from the biggest internet retailers on the planet to help sellers and brands win the game of product discovery.

Consumers are getting smarter everyday. They are raising the bar for the internet retail experience. Retailers and brands are constantly in search of resources to stay ahead. With our help: they can do it. We help the retailers and brands create content via our proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine and crowd solution. We think this combo is a complete game changer; at least, there aren’t any other companies that combine these approaches. What’s more: we do this while helping busy clients maintain their current work-flow.

If you are interested, our team has experts with experience solving big SEO and content optimization strategies at industry-leading retailers like Walmart, eBay and Magento. We’d love to fit you in for a quick (30 minutes tops) consultation for your e-commerce needs.